


Lion-Hearted Girl

by delgaserasca



Category: Spooks | MI-5
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-10
Updated: 2014-04-10
Packaged: 2018-01-18 22:09:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1444636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/delgaserasca/pseuds/delgaserasca
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set in Code9. Zafar and Ros at the end of the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lion-Hearted Girl

> this is a gift, it comes with a price;  
>  who is the lamb and who is the knife?  
>  **Florence + the Machine, _Rabbit Heart_**  
> 

 

 

 

 

"Don't move."

The barrel is pressed to the base of his skull; he didn't hear her approach. He's out of practice, he thinks. She's still on top form.

"Who are you?"

Zaf smiles, takes his chances. "A dead man."

 

 

 

 

Under the dust of the city she looks half-dead. Emaciated, she is even sharper than he remembers her, a body made up entirely of vertices and hollows. Her hair is longer; she'd look kinder for it were she not armed to the teeth - the revolver in her hand, the knife he knows is in her boot; her hands, her feet, her eyes. The world hasn't been kind to Zaf, but it's shown Ros no mercy.

There is a moment when she doesn't recognise him. Zaf sees the questions flash across her face, barely a twitch, but her pupils dilate and she exhales and she doesn't drop the gun. "My god."

"I'm sorry, you've got me confused with someone else," he cracks. He feels an overwhelming need to touch her, to embrace her. He wants to be sure she's real; the thought is crossing her mind, too. She stutters bodily, and then hesitates. Her eyes drop to his hands, and the shameless scars across his arms. He forces himself not to flinch. He wonders what she sees, what she doesn't. He wonders how good he is at hiding.

Not very.

They stay like that for five whole minutes before Ros lowers her arms. "Start from the beginning," she says, "and go slowly."

 

 

 

 

It's the same story he's told anyone who has asked: he survived death and returned home to the apocalypse. Ros watches him as he speaks, her palms flat on her thighs, fingers spread. She blinks at unexpected junctures. Zaf's not sure she's breathing but for a few sharp intakes of breath. She too, then, is fractured in unseen places.

When he finishes talking Ros continues to stare. He feels uncomfortable beneath the scrutiny of her gaze; in the distance a siren wails, glass breaks, birds scatter with cries of alarm. The whole world is pulsating _caution, caution_ , red lights and shattered windows, but Ros doesn't move.

Eventually she exhales, and Zaf nods. This is a language every one in England speaks, the language of exhaustion. A sigh is currency in a voiceless underworld. He wants to give her water, offer her food, but hospitality translates differently now. So instead he offers a meal of comfort, open hands filled with good intentions.

They stay that way until curfew.

 

 

 

 

He should ask after the others - Ros expects him to, and he wants to know, but it is difficult to form the words in his mouth. He sleeps in abandoned buildings, away from the populace, repulsed by their warrens, their intimacy; speaking has become an effort. Ros, too, avoids the crowds though she is less discerning about where she sleeps, and more than once Zaf pulls her away from the tribes of homeless who've also abandoned the re-housing camps. After one especially brusque protest Zaf pulls her roughly by the forearm. "I never took you for socialite," he admonishes, and Ros scowls but doesn't reply. If she was cool before, then now she is is a thin sheet of ice, ghostly and brittle.

He should ask after the others, but he's afraid of what she'll tell him. He's afraid to think of his colleagues and friends, to think of them torn limb from limb, or disfigured and grossly ill. He's afraid he'll have to pity them. He's afraid he won't know how to.

In the end it doesn't matter. Ros intuits the question - how could she not? - and the answer is unexpected. "I don't know what happened to them. I don't know if..." She tails off. He feels a sharp burst of sympathy at the expression on her face, momentarily unguarded and uncertain. She looks like a stranger. She looks like a portrait of herself, there but not quite.

She's not a spy any more. It seems important to note, despite being obvious. She is less prickly, more dangerous.

He's not a spy either. Somehow that seems less relevant.

"I wasn't there," she says, finally. "I made a stupid decision after you—" She breaks off suddenly and looks him in the eye. "It wasn't stupid at the time. And then it was."

He doesn't understand what she's telling him except that she wants him to know, and maybe that she wants his forgiveness. "That doesn't sound like you," he says.

"I can’t make it sound more like me."

That much, he knows, is absolute.

 

 

 

 

Losing Ros is inevitable, really, and almost a relief. One moment she is with him, and then she is not, and it takes all Zaf's willpower not to question the reality of her existence. She was there. She spoke to him. And then she wasn't.

Another night, another empty high rise. He throws his few possessions into the corner of the room - a shank, a hoodie he stole before the bomb, two buttons and an empty tin can he uses to collect water - and hears a suspicious rattle as they tumble to the floor. He shakes the sweater empty of its treasures and finds something new: Ros' gun and two amber-tinted prescription bottles, one full, one half empty. The labels are torn, but Zaf can just about make out the type - _ONE tablet to be taken THREE times a day._ Anti-radiation meds, the good kind.

Zaf holds the bottles up to the window and tries not to blink as the fading daylight illuminates the room in a dull orange hue. He thinks of Ros and the way her bones pushed out from her face, her wrists, her knees. The regret is as inevitable as her loss, and he realises now that he had become her confessional before she stepped out into the world, unarmed but for her hands and her wit. The gun is pitiful on the floor, heavy and dark and foreign to him now. He flings it from the window then sits down against the wall, prescription still in hand. It occurs to him that whilst Ros was at hand he had become corporeal - someone knew he was alive and back in the world. But Ros has disappeared like cigarette smoke on a cold night and now Zaf is alone, only half-real once again.

 

 

 

 

He wakes before dawn, tucks the pills into his pocket, and breathes deep. The city is restless quiet beneath him, and Ros is out there, too, a memory of a memory, and fading every day.

**end.**

**Author's Note:**

> Fic amnesty. Originally posted to LJ. Title and epigraph from Florence + the Machine's _Rabbit Heart_ , of course.


End file.
